Pixel Prospector

By: Derek Yu

On: July 30th, 2009

Bust out your bookmarks, freeware fans – AuthenticKaizen has turned his amazing “Promisingly Good Freeware Games in Development” thread on TIGForums into a full-fledged website. When he first mentioned the idea, I imagined it was going to be a simple Blogger blog (which would have been totally fine), but wow, this is something else! Fantastic work!

Here’s AK’s announcement of Pixel Prospector, your source for in-development freeware games.

Posted in Community, Freeware, Videos | Tags: AuthenticKaizen

Anthony Flack

Truly excellent work. Bookmark deployed.

Also at 0:20 my nostalgia radar went ballistic. Cosmic Prison Commando must have passed me by at the time but I’d recognise the CPC’s graphics mode and palette anywhere! I’d never seen any game made with CPC tribute graphics before.
http://b-mcc.com// BMcC

Why is Balding’s Quest not on the list, AK? :'(

Excellent site, though!
http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/ AuthenticKaizen

Wow, thanks for the feature Derek!!
Really appreciate that.

Balding’ Quest as well as many other games are not on the site yet because i mentioned several weeks ago that im going to launch the site today…and well, while i have added enough games to announce the site – many games simply didnt made it to the launch because of the time constraint.

Expect Balding’s Quest as well as many other games to be added soon.
Caliber9

WOW AuthenticKaizen, this is amazing! Your site looks incredible. This will be a great help for all indie game devs! Thanks so much.
Flamebait

Cheers!
BeamSplashX

The site looks awesome! Update that sidebar, TIGmasters! Exclamation!
Chris.R

Great idea/site. Keep up the good work.

On a related note, I wish people who had obviously worked really hard on a game wouldn’t name it after a commercial series, regardless of the source of inspiration.

Companies can choose to ignore similar gameplay, but might be obligated to do something about the name.

Even ignoring the legality, it still seems morally questionable. Would I really have a right to make a game called “Cave Story: Adventures” without consulting Pixel? Shouldn’t we show the same respect for publishers?
Kevin Gadd

Why is there a screenshot of Order of Ecclesia at 0:17? Is that a fangame or something?
Phasma Felis

Allow me to be the first to say: OMG CAVE STORY RIPOFF.

Seriously, this is fantastic. My only objection is I WANNA PLAY THEM NOW. Maybe you could add a “Promising Good Freeware Games Developed”? :D
Dusty Spur

Kevin Gadd: I’m assuming it’s a fangame, the environments don’t look like OoE.

I checked out the website and saw Spelunky on it and I was like “whoa it’s version 0.99 now I wonder if it’ll work on my laptop now” and it does and so I bookmarked the site because I officially love it. (I also love Spelunky.)
Garbled

Score for using RushJet1. True NSFs for the ween. I’ve become depressed at the abuse of the word “chiptunes” in recent years.
The Monster King

What about Recession, it is very in development as far as I know and it was on the list!
Xion

This is awesome, man. Great job. ilu.
Nikica

Bookmarked. Awesome site, downloaded Microbes and Neon Runner and many many more games caught my attention, I’ll try to get my hands on everything, the RTS 0 A.D. looks great.
davidp

its alive! finally, nice to see kaizen making it complete :)
DangerousDave

Did anyone else realise that every game in that video bar 1 or 2 is a platformer? – Nothing wrong with that, just interesting to note.
Radnom

Wow! This is absolutely incredible, what an awesome effort.

It’s a great push for the developers too!
Johan

Amazing site!

With one huge drawback, however…it’s just torture to look at all that nice work and know that I can’t play all the games yet! :(

DangerousDave: All the games in the platformer segment of the video are platformers, yes… :)
Rain

@ Kevin Gadd

It’s Castlevania – Moonlight Requiem

http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/2009/07/castlevania-moonlight-requiem/

a fanproject. But I really doubt that we will see this as a finished and/or playable game.
SirNiko

I love this website.

My only concern is that I can’t search by which games are announced, have release dates, or are already released.

Maybe make a method to sort the games into those categories? Announced, announced with demo, has a release date, is already out.

Other than that, this is fantastic. I’ll be checking this every day.

-SirNiko
http://www.cymonsgames.com/contact-us/ Cymon

Needs a “submit a game” form somewhere.

And it needs to mention ASCIIpOrtal.
http://www.mawsoft.com/blog Impossible

I’m curious about how many of them are playable games and how many are glorified (or straight up…) mockups. It’d be nice if the site had a % complete rating. I know that some of these games are a still a pixel artist’s dream and others are far along, playable, and fun.
Jcircuit

The default position for the youtube video was a screenshot of Ciellus… I glanced at it and thought it was a Ciellus trailer… :(

Cool website, though.
http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/ AuthenticKaizen

thanks for the positive feedback @all!

@TheMonsterKing:
as i already mentioned in my above post i will add those games from the list later.

@SirNiko:
thats a good idea that you have here.
i consider to implement something like this…probably with tags.

@Cymon:
im thinking of adding something like this in the future.

@impossible:
a % rating that shows how much a game is already been done would be nice. problem is that its very hard to find that out oftentimes.
a way to make this possible would be to encourage the developers to inform me about the current state of their games by mentioning an approximate percental number of completion.
http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/ AuthenticKaizen

well…according to SirNikos suggestion i just added a “playable” tag on each game that offers a demo or more… :)
SirNiko

You rock, Kaizen.
name

Why “pixel” prospector though? What about 3D games which use polygons?
http://www.mawsoft.com/blog Impossible

@AuthenticKaizen: I understand that its hard to get an accurate % complete, even asking the author. Maybe you can have 3-4 stages of completion? Something like…

1) Concept phase. (“I’m an artist looking for a programmer” or “The engine has been started”)

2) Playable but incomplete. Most mechanics are in place. Some level design has been done.

3) Betapre-release.

4) Released.

@name: Polygons get rasterized to pixels eventually right? Pixel Prospector doesn’t necessarily mean pixel art, it could mean pixel shaders as well :).
Flamebait

@name:

Although many people have a bias against 3D, there’s none evident in the site’s name. It seems to be a reference to pixels on the output surface, not to any particular style of graphics. I wouldn’t make anything of it.
http://www.phubans.com phubans

Awesome site!! And thanks for featuring 3 of my games on your site/video! Authentic Kaizen understands my shit! <:]
Dave

@name

3D games use pixels too.